by Lokemun Magar

Created on: March 02, 2008   Last Updated: August 07, 2011

The dangers of labeling a child are often more evident than the advantages of labeling a child. While labeling helps put the child in a box so that professionals such as psychiatrists, doctors and educationalists can administer the need helps to develop the child positively, dangers prevail. Uninformed people who may come into contact with the child, such as extended family members, fearful teachers and the public may make the wrong connections that result in unhappiness for the child and his family.  

We come across children of various learning disabilities especially in the teaching profession, the more common being children labeled Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, more commonly known by its acronym ADHD. Even then, children with ADHD are all clearly individuals in their own rights, some of them seemingly normal with their individualistic idiosyncrasies that some may wonder if the label ADHD that was slapped on them was necessary.

To make it all the more confusing, there is the ADHD active as well as the ADHD passive child. You may meet one or both the ADHD active child as well as the ADHD passive child. The ADHD active child will obviously be all over the place while the ADHD passive child will sit at a corner smiling demurely and yet oblivious to the chaos around him.

Does it help any educator to be informed that his class children are autistic, dyslexic, ADHD active or ADHD passive? It does not make much of a difference to a discerning for each child to wear a label around his neck. It does not matter what the children are labeled because each child has his own set of behavioral or learning problems.

The positive side of labeling is that you are able to characterize the abilities or rather the disabilities of the children with disabilities and thus use the right approaches to teaching them and handling their behaviors.

The down side of labeling unfortunately outweighs the positive side. Somehow a label, as in calling a big dog clumsy, ferocious and precocious, gives one a preconceived notion of what something is or is not. Labeling a child with learning disabilities somehow gives one the feeling that the child is altogether abnormal and that is a hundred percent not true.

Children with Autism or ADHD, for example, can often have an intelligence quota of above average. Because of their disorder which makes them sensitive to sound or touch, they are also extra sensitive to what is happening around them. One day, my ADHD pupil said, "I know

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